In this video the man takes off his mask…. he becomes real and is considered the rebel.
Was he rebelling against God? No he was rebelling against the “norm” or status quo. He had have to have faith in something to take his mask off?
Does God ask us all to be faceless people? Does he ask us to be all alike?
Do WE expect everyone to be like us? Or at least to conform to the “rules”?
If someone does not conform do we chase after them with our own standards and rules until they do? And if they don’t give up do we have a stand off with them… thinking “My way is better than yours… you are an outsider now”. Leave them for dead... or at least as going to hell....
This feeling of division or separation that we feel because of “sin” has more to do with what the world (or our peer group) says to us about sin than the fact that we sinned. We get guilty feelings about things we ourselves don’t consider sin because our world calls it bad. When we do something that is perceived as sin our family and friends are there to chase us down like they did the man in the video and make us conform, to put our mask back on without ever asking where we are with God. They base their judgment on their standards of sin and disobedience. Don’t get me wrong here. We all sin. We are all sinners. And we are to try to help our brothers and sisters out of sin, but we must be careful about condemning and judging them or placing our version of right and wrong on them.
When we finally get the courage to be who we are there are plenty of people there to judge us. To make us feel as though we have let God down… whether it is a piercing, a tattoo, having a drink, who we choose to love…and make us feel unworthy. Like we have to hide or put our mask back on and pretend.
Are we listening to the world or the Word? Is there scripture to back up that feeling of unworthiness? Or the feeling God doesn’t like us anymore? I went in search of the verses that we all seem to know but can’t quit remember their address. This is what I found.
I did a quick search in the NIV concordance there are around 125 verses on sin:
57 of the verses talk about God’s Forgiveness….his atonement…. In other words His taking our sins away with no conditions or obligation. Not his condemnation or shunning us for our sin. In fact Romans 8:1 says “ Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.”
I found 54 verses acknowledge that sin is….. Crouching at our door and that we don’t get what we deserve when it comes to sin, that sin without faith leads to death.
7 on Jesus sinless state
3 that we should confess our sins
God knows everything He knows we are all have secrets in our lives and even tells us that we should not deny that: (1 John 1:8) “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless (over sin), Christ died for the ungodly Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us
Since we have now been justified by his blood how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!”
This passage is quite clear… we don’t have to be perfect when we come to Christ and we will never be perfect while we are in Christ.
Our world uses our circumstances, actions, words, inaction, etc to keep us tied down, bound, ineffective for God based on their standards. We start to believe our “sin” is proof that we are not worthy, as a reminder of how low we are and how “Godly” everyone else is, you know they don’t sin. J You see, the truth is all of us have at least one thing that we are hiding. One “sin” or part of our life that we believe, if anyone else knew about, would disqualify us as worthy people let alone faith filled people. It would ruin our testimony. We are unwilling to share it with anyone so we are tied down with fear…. Fear of someone finding out, fear of being called out on it. Fear….
I believe that living in fear and pretending it isn’t there, hiding it…. disqualifies us more than everyone knowing. The secrets that we keep separate us from God. If we don’t acknowledge it to Him we think He won’t know. It keeps us separated and feeling unworthy and isolated from God and people. We pretend no one else has a secret like ours. We pretend that we are the only one struggling with something. We pretend that no one knows. We pretend, we pretend, we pretend…. pretending keeps us isolated.
Alone
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